Eat Thy Neighbour (20 page)

Amazingly, he had been witnessed walking through the neighbourhood with little Yelena. When he was interrogated by the police in connection with her disappearance, his wife insisted he had been at home during the time in question and Chikatilo was released without charge. Later, a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko would be arrested, tried and executed for Yelena’s murder.

For more than three years André Chikatilo kept the beast in his head under control, but it surfaced again in 1981 shortly after he got a new job with the Rostovnerund construction company in Rostov-on-Don. As Rostovnerund’s supply administrator Chikatilo was required to travel a lot, sourcing the endless list of material and equipment his company needed in their work. When he got off the bus at Nvovshankhtinsk on 3 September he spotted seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko standing in the bus shelter. He approached her and propositioned her; eventually she agreed to sex for a small price. By the time she realised just how high the price was going to be it was too late.

Together they walked to a nearby strip of woodland commonly used as an erosion break between fields all over the Ukraine. Once safely beyond prying eyes, Chikatilo strangled the girl, sinking his teeth into the tender flesh of her neck almost before she slipped into unconsciousness. He drank her blood as it gushed from the wound but quickly turned his attention to her breasts. He bit off her nipples, swallowing them whole before mutilating her genitals with a knife. The taste of flesh and blood was far more sexually exciting than just strangling a nine-year-old child. It would be more than nine months before André Chikatilo struck again, but in the second half of 1982 he would claim five victims. This time a little boy would be included in the list of casualties.

When the first body was discovered in early autumn 1982 it had lain so long in the tiny strip of woodland that only fragments of skin, hair and clothing remained intact. Police inquiries determined that her name was Lyubov Biryuk and she had been thirteen years old. She had been missing since 12 June – the day she met André Chikatilo. What police found most startling about the crime scene was how exposed it was. Although the body was found among the trees, the wooded area was only 50 yards wide and a main roadway ran only
20 yards beyond the tree-line. A well-worn footpath lay only feet from the body. If this seemed like a peculiarly exposed place to commit murder, the autopsy revealed just how horrifyingly odd the murder was. There were at least 22 knife wounds on the little body, the eyes had been savagely hacked out and although the corpse was badly decomposed there was clear evidence of knife wounds on the pelvic bone.

Local police knew all too well that the majority of murders are committed either during an argument among family or friends, the so-called ‘crime of passion’, or as a result of a robbery attempt gone wrong. Neither of these scenarios fitted the case in question and police assumed it had been a random act of violence, making it almost impossible to solve unless the assailant was clumsy enough to leave physical evidence at the scene. There was no such evidence anywhere near Lyubov’s body. Considering the violence of the crime, police in the western world would immediately have considered the possibility of a serial killer, but in the Soviet Union there was, officially, no such thing. Serial killers, like unemployment, homosexuality and prostitution were sicknesses confined to the decadent, capitalistic West. The only thing left was to begin rousting all mental patients not under lock and key and any known sex offenders. The only obvious indicator was that the perpetrator was undoubtedly male. When the next body turned up it was found to be a boy. This completely confused the search parameters and, despite the fact that the wound patterns were the same as on the first body, the police could not believe that sexual assaults on a girl and a boy could have been committed by the same man. There must be two murderers at work and one of them was obviously a crazed homosexual. Former mental patients, convicted sex offenders and members of the tightly closeted gay community were rounded up, thrown in jail and grilled endlessly. One man who had served time for rape committed suicide, as did three members of Rostov’s gay community.

While police were trying to make sense of the growing string of mutilated corpses and hordes of suspects, André Chikatilo was looking for ever more creative ways to satiate his unquenchable desires. Not only were young boys now on his list of victims, but how the grotesque, vicarious sexual encounters were acted out was becoming ever more bizarre. The mouths of most of the victims were now stuffed with dirt and grass; whether this was simply to keep them quiet or for some more subtle reason is not known. The earlier attacks had been swift and violent but now he was taking his time, making more and shallower cuts to prolong the victim’s agony and his own sexual arousal. The genitals of most early victims, both male and female, had been cut out and Chikatilo would later admit that he carried them away with him to chew on as a way of reliving the attack. The police also began finding evidence of small fires near the bodies, but could not imagine how this might relate to the killings; the fact was Chikatilo had begun carrying a small pot along with him on his ‘business trips’ for the construction company, in order to cook the victim’s genitals and eat them. If cannibalism had not been a part of his master plan, it had definitely evolved into an integral component. The tongues of many of his later prey were also found to be missing, having been added to the cannibalistic stew. The greater the indignity he could inflict, either before or after death, the more powerful Chikatilo felt.

Despite the best efforts of the police to keep the lid on a situation they were clearly unable to handle, rumours of what was happening to the missing children and young people were rapidly spreading beyond the Rostov area. Even if word of the fifteen children who had disappeared by May 1984 could have been kept secret, the continuing interrogations – which had now been carried out on more than 150,000 men – could not have gone unnoticed. But even on the rare occasions when the press mentioned one of the killings, or missing children,
nothing was said to indicate there was any connection with past disappearances. There could be no serial killers in the Soviet Union.

Finally, in complete frustration, the head of the Rostov police detective bureau asked Moscow for help. It came in the form of Viktor Burakov from the Moscow Division of Serious Crime. At thirty-seven, Burakov was better at analysing physical evidence than any other detective in the Soviet Union and was noted for his absolute doggedness. There was no doubt the Rostov police needed all the help they could get; during the first eight months of 1984 the mutilated bodies of eight more children were discovered, along with those of two unidentified women. Unlike the earlier corpses, the eyes in these had been left intact, but the sexual mutilations were becoming worse with each attack: the autopsy on a fourteen-year-old boy showed more than 70 knife wounds. And not only were the attacks getting closer and closer together, they were starting to appear in places where earlier bodies had been found. The monster was revisiting his old haunts.

Because of the ferocity of the attacks, even Burakov was convinced that the assailant had to be someone with demonstrable mental problems. Twice, mildly retarded teenage boys were arrested and a confession was beaten out of them, but Burakov was astute enough to know that forced confessions were less than worthless. The only thing that seemed to link the two boys with the victims was the fact that they had both used public transport, and most of the victims had been found near bus or railway stations. But this was certainly not enough to convict anyone of anything. When yet another freshly murdered body turned up, Burakov was forced to turn his prime suspect loose – the boy had obviously been killed while the suspect was in jail.

It was only when forensic experts found semen smears around the rectum of one of the young, male victims that Burakov had
his first, solid piece of evidence. The antigens in semen were known to match the antigens in blood, so the man now known as the ‘Rostov Ripper’ would have to have AB blood type, the same as the semen found on fourteen-year-old Sergi Markov. Unfortunately, none of the suspects in custody, and virtually no one on the possible suspect list, matched this type, but at least it was a lead that could be followed in future investigations.

At Burakov’s request, the Minister of the Interior appointed a dozen more detectives to the case and a task force numbering more than 200 people in different capacities was now conducting the largest manhunt in the history of the Soviet Union.

Working on the theory that the Rostov Ripper was finding most of his victims at bus stops and railway stations, Burakov placed plain-clothes officers at nearly every public transport terminal in any town or village where bodies had been found. They were instructed to watch for anyone acting suspiciously, or approaching children or young women. A description of suspects was to be taken and if possible without arousing too much suspicion, their names acquired.

One of those who did, eventually, catch the eye of a detective assigned to the Rostov-on-Don central railway station was a slim, grey-haired man who appeared to be in his late forties, who consistently approached teenage girls and young women with whom he obviously had no connection. He had done nothing to warrant arrest so a few questions were quietly put to him. His name, he said, was André Chikatilo; he worked for Rostovnerund Construction and travelled a lot in and out of Rostov. Yes, he did talk to the youngsters. He used to be a teacher and still missed the company of young people. It all seemed perfectly logical and innocent, so the detective allowed Chikatilo to walk away. Still, there was something odd and furtive about the way the man kept looking around him even when he was not talking to the police. So the detective followed him.

When Chikatilo hired a prostitute to give him oral sex in a corner of the railway station he was arrested for indecent public behaviour. Under questioning Chikatilo admitted a weakness for prostitutes. It was a pretty unsavoury admission, but not a major crime, and Major Zanasovsky might have let him go if it had not been for the contents of his briefcase. Inside were a jar of petroleum jelly, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope and a dirty towel, not the sort of things a businessman usually took with him on a buying trip for a construction company.

Handed over to Viktor Burakov for questioning, Chikatilo was given a blood test to see if his antigens matched those of the semen samples recovered from the victims. While the lab was carrying out its tests, Chikatilo was left to cool his heels in a cell in the hope that he might change his story. Burakov learned two things about Chikatilo: he was a member in good standing in the Communist Party and his blood was type A, not AB. One more in the parade of thousands of possible suspects was turned loose. A few months later, Burakov heard that André Chikatilo had been convicted of the theft of three rolls of linoleum and was sentenced to three months in prison. It would cost him his membership in the Party and probably his job, but petty theft certainly did not make the man the Rostov Ripper.

After August 1984 the killings seemed to stop altogether. A few more horribly mutilated bodies turned up, but they had obviously been murdered much earlier. Since his encounter with the police and arrest for theft, Chikatilo was keeping his head down and following the progress of the Rostov Ripper case in the now much-liberalised Russian press. He was clever enough, cautious enough and sufficiently in control to wait more than two-and-a-half years before he struck again.

Meanwhile, Viktor Burakov took a step unprecedented in Russian police history: he contacted a psychiatrist familiar with western methods of profiling serial killers. Dr Alexandr Bukhanovsky put together a six-page report that Burakov found
interesting, but it did nothing to help him narrow down his search. By May 1987 Burakov was no closer to solving the case than he had been three years earlier, but his flagging interest was reinvigorated when Moscow police began reporting the murders of young boys – all stabbed repeatedly and sexually mutilated. Realising that there had to be a connection between these new deaths and the ones around Rostov, Burakov went back to Bukhanovsky, this time allowing the psychiatrist full access to every police report from every case tied to the Rostov Ripper. Bukhanovsky’s new report ran to 65 pages and gave a detailed description of the unknown suspect. The man, Bukhanovsky said, was not psychotic because he could control what he did. He was heterosexual, he was a sadist and probably impotent – the knife serving as a substitute for entering the victim with his penis. Because the killings had almost all taken place during the middle of the week, the man probably had a job that allowed him to travel. His age was probably between forty-five and fifty years of age. Most unsettling was the conclusion that while the perpetrator was able to control his need to kill for extended periods, he would kill again and continue to do so until he was forcibly stopped. It was a good report, but how did Burakov go about finding one specific, impotent, travelling man in his late forties, among the hundreds of thousands of possible suspects?

In mid-1990 Chikatilo started killing again. After having abstained for so long, the frantic bloodlust that drove him had become stronger than ever and, once resumed, the murders and mutilations occurred at an ever-increasing pace. By July of that year the police in Rostov and Moscow estimated that the Rostov Ripper had accumulated a tally of 32 victims. Under increasing pressure to catch the man whom Dr Bukhanovsky had dubbed ‘Suspect X’, Burakov devised a new plan that he hoped would force the killer into the open. Every train and bus station in the greater Rostov area would remain under police surveillance, but now the officers at the majority of the stations would be in
uniform to make their presence obvious. Those at the remaining stations would be in plain clothes, making it appear that only some stations were being watched. Burakov hoped that the suspect would avoid those stations where uniformed officers were stationed, limiting his activities to those which appeared unguarded. To cover every possible avenue, there would also be police stationed in any woodland near a rail or bus station; these men would be disguised as peasants and foresters so they would remain as anonymous as possible. It was a massive task requiring more than 350 officers.